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JOHN BUNYAN AT THE HOUSE OF
REPRESENTATIVES - ROOSEVELT 1906
The Man With the Muck-Rake
It follows the full text transcript of
Theodore Roosevelt's The Man With the
Muck-Rake speech, delivered at
Washington D.C. - April 14, 1906.
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Over a century
ago, |
Washington laid
the cornerstone of the Capitol in what was then
little more than a tract of wooded wilderness
here beside the Potomac. We now find it
necessary to provide by great additional
buildings for the business of the government.
This growth in the need for the housing of the
government is but a proof and example of the way
in which the nation has grown and the sphere of
action of the national government has grown. We
now administer the affairs of a nation in which
the extraordinary growth of population has been
outstripped by the growth of wealth in complex
interests. The material problems that face us
today are not such as they were in Washington's
time, but the underlying facts of human nature
are the same now as they were then. Under
altered external form we war with the same
tendencies toward evil that were evident in
Washington's time, and are helped by the same
tendencies for good. It is about some of these
that I wish to say a word today.
In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress you may
recall the description of the Man with the Muck
Rake, the man who could look no way but
downward, with the muck rake in his hand; who
was offered a celestial crown for his muck rake,
but who would neither look up nor regard the
crown he was offered, but continued to rake to
himself the filth of the floor.
In Pilgrim's Progress the Man with the Muck Rake
is set forth as the example of him whose vision
is fixed on carnal instead of spiritual things.
Yet he also typifies the man who in this life
consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty,
and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only
on that which is vile and debasing.
Now, it is very necessary that we should not
flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing.
There is filth on the floor, and it must be
scraped up with the muck rake; and there are
times and places where this service is the most
needed of all the services that can be
performed. But the man who never does anything
else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save
of his feats with the muck rake, speedily
becomes, not a help but one of the most potent
forces for evil.
There are in the body politic, economic and
social, many and grave evils, and there is
urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them.
There should be relentless exposure of and
attack upon every evil man, whether politician
or business man, every evil practice, whether in
politics, business, or social life. I hail as a
benefactor every writer or speaker, every man
who, on the platform or in a book, magazine, or
newspaper, with merciless severity makes such
attack, provided always that he in his turn
remembers that the attack is of use only if it
is absolutely truthful.
The liar is no whit better than the thief, and
if his mendacity takes the form of slander he
may be worse than most thieves. It puts a
premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an
honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration
to assail a bad man with untruth.
An epidemic of indiscriminate assault upon
character does no good, but very great harm. The
soul of every scoundrel is gladdened whenever an
honest man is assailed, or even when a scoundrel
is untruthfully assailed.
Now, it is easy to twist out of shape what I
have just said, easy to affect to misunderstand
it, and if it is slurred over in repetition not
difficult really to misunderstand it. Some
persons are sincerely incapable of understanding
that to denounce mud slinging does not mean the
endorsement of whitewashing; and both the
interested individuals who need whitewashing and
those others who practice mud slinging like to
encourage such confusion of ideas.
One of the chief counts against those who make
indiscriminate assault upon men in business or
men in public life is that they invite a
reaction which is sure to tell powerfully in
favor of the unscrupulous scoundrel who really
ought to be attacked, who ought to be exposed,
who ought, if possible, to be put in the
penitentiary. If Aristides is praised overmuch
as just, people get tired of hearing it; and
overcensure of the unjust finally and from
similar reasons results in their favor.
Any excess is almost sure to invite a reaction;
and, unfortunately, the reactions instead of
taking the form of punishment of those guilty of
the excess, is apt to take the form either of
punishment of the unoffending or of giving
immunity, and even strength, to offenders. The
effort to make financial or political profit out
of the destruction of character can only result
in public calamity. Gross and reckless assaults
on character, whether on the stump or in
newspaper, magazine, or book, create a morbid
and vicious public sentiment, and at the same
time act as a profound deterrent to able men of
normal sensitiveness and tend to prevent them
from entering the public service at any price.
As an instance in point, I may mention that one
serious difficulty encountered in getting the
right type of men to dig the Panama canal is the
certainty that they will be exposed, both
without, and, I am sorry to say, sometimes
within, Congress, to utterly reckless assaults
on their character and capacity.
At the risk of repetition let me say again that
my plea is not for immunity to, but for the most
unsparing exposure of, the politician who
betrays his trust, of the big business man who
makes or spends his fortune in illegitimate or
corrupt ways. There should be a resolute effort
to hunt every such man out of the position he
has disgraced. Expose the crime, and hunt down
the criminal; but remember that even in the case
of crime, if it is attacked in sensational,
lurid, and untruthful fashion, the attack may do
more damage to the public mind than the crime
itself.
It is because I feel that there should be no
rest in the endless war against the forces of
evil that I ask the war be conducted with sanity
as well as with resolution. The men with the
muck rakes are often indispensable to the well
being of society; but only if they know when to
stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the
celestial crown above them, to the crown of
worthy endeavor. There are beautiful things
above and round about them; and if they
gradually grow to feel that the whole world is
nothing but muck, their power of usefulness is
gone.
If the whole picture is painted black there
remains no hue whereby to single out the rascals
for distinction from their fellows. Such
painting finally induces a kind of moral color
blindness; and people affected by it come to the
conclusion that no man is really black, and no
man really white, but they are all gray.
In other words, they neither believe in the
truth of the attack, nor in the honesty of the
man who is attacked; they grow as suspicious of
the accusation as of the offense; it becomes
well nigh hopeless to stir them either to wrath
against wrongdoing or to enthusiasm for what is
right; and such a mental attitude in the public
gives hope to every knave, and is the despair of
honest men. To assail the great and admitted
evils of our political and industrial life with
such crude and sweeping generalizations as to
include decent men in the general condemnation
means the searing of the public con science.
There results a general attitude either of
cynical belief in and indifference to public
corruption or else of a distrustful inability to
discriminate between the good and the bad.
Either attitude is fraught with untold damage to
the country as a whole.
The fool who has not sense to discriminate
between what is good and what is bad is well
nigh as dangerous as the man who does
discriminate and yet chooses the bad. There is
nothing more distressing to every good patriot,
to every good American, than the hard, scoffing
spirit which treats the allegation of dishonesty
in a public man as a cause for laughter. Such
laughter is worse than the crackling of thorns
under a pot, for it denotes not merely the
vacant mind, but the heart in which high
emotions have been choked before they could grow
to fruition. There is any amount of good in the
world, and there never was a time when loftier
and more disinterested work for the betterment
of mankind was being done than now. The forces
that tend for evil are great and terrible, but
the forces of truth and love and courage and
honesty and generosity and sympathy are also
stronger than ever before. It is a foolish and
timid, no less than a wicked thing, to blink the
fact that the forces of evil are strong, but it
is even worse to fail to take into account the
strength of the forces that tell for good.
Hysterical sensationalism is the poorest weapon
wherewith to fight for lasting righteousness.
The men who with stern sobriety and truth assail
the many evils of our time, whether in the
public press, or in magazines, or in books, are
the leaders and allies of all engaged in the
work for social and political betterment. But if
they give good reason for distrust of what they
say, if they chill the ardor of those who demand
truth as a primary virtue, they thereby betray
the good cause and play into the hands of the
very men against whom they are nominally at war.
In his Ecclesiastical Polity that fine old
Elizabethan divine, Bishop Hooker, wrote:
He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that
they are not so well governed as they ought to
be shall never want attentive and favorable
hearers, because they know the manifold defects
whereunto every kind of regimen is subject, but
the secret lets and difficulties, which in
public proceedings are innumerable and
inevitable, they have not ordinarily the
judgment to consider.
This truth should be kept constantly in mind by
every free people desiring to preserve the
sanity and poise indispensable to the permanent
success of self-government. Yet, on the other
hand, it is vital not to permit this spirit of
sanity and self-command to degenerate into mere
mental stagnation. Bad though a state of
hysterical excitement is, and evil though the
results are which come from the violent
oscillations such excitement invariably
produces, yet a sodden acquiescence in evil is
even worse.
At this moment we are passing through a period
of great unrest -- social, political, and
industrial unrest. It is of the utmost
importance for our future that this should prove
to be not the unrest of mere rebelliousness
against life, of mere dissatisfaction with the
inevitable inequality of conditions, but the
unrest of a resolute and eager ambition to
secure the betterment of the individual and the
nation.
So far as this movement of agitation throughout
the country takes the form of a fierce
discontent with evil, of a determination to
punish the authors of evil, whether in industry
or politics, the feeling is to be heartily
welcomed as a sign of healthy life.
If, on the other hand, it turns into a mere
crusade of appetite against appetite, of a
contest between the brutal greed of the "have
nots" and the brutal greed of the "haves," then
it has no significance for good, but only for
evil. If it seeks to establish a line of
cleavage, not along the line which divides good
men from bad, but along that other line, running
at right angles thereto, which divides those who
are well off from those who are less well off,
then it will be fraught with immeasurable harm
to the body politic.
We can no more and no less afford to condone
evil in the man of capital than evil in the man
of no capital. The wealthy man who exults
because there is a failure of justice in the
effort to bring some trust magnate to account
for his misdeeds is as bad as, and no worse
than, the so-called labor leader who clamorously
strives to excite a foul class feeling on behalf
of some other labor leader who is implicated in
murder. One attitude is as bad as the other, and
no worse; in each case the accused is entitled
to exact justice; and in neither case is there
need of action by others which can be construed
into an expression of sympathy for crime.
It is a prime necessity that if the present
unrest is to result in permanent good the
emotion shall be translated into action, and
that the action shall be marked by honesty,
sanity, and self-restraint. There is mighty
little good in a mere spasm of reform. The
reform that counts is that which comes through
steady, continuous growth; violent emotionalism
leads to exhaustion.
It is important to this people to grapple with
the problems connected with the amassing of
enormous fortunes, and the use of those
fortunes, both corporate and individual, in
business. We should discriminate in the sharpest
way between fortunes well won and fortunes ill
won; between those gained as an incident to
performing great services to the community as a
whole and those gained in evil fashion by
keeping just within the limits of mere law
honesty. Of course, no amount of charity in
spending such fortunes in any way compensates
for misconduct in making them.
As a matter of personal conviction, and without
pretending to discuss the details or formulate
the system, I feel that we shall ultimately have
to consider the adoption of some such scheme as
that of a progressive tax on all fortunes,
beyond a certain amount, either given in life or
devised or bequeathed upon death to any
individual -- a tax so framed as to put it out
of the power of the owner of one of these
enormous fortunes to hand on more than a certain
amount to any one individual; the tax of course,
to be imposed by the national and not the state
government. Such taxation should, of course, be
aimed merely at the inheritance or transmission
in their entirety of those fortunes swollen
beyond all healthy limits. Again, the national
government must in some form exercise
supervision over corporations engaged in
interstate business -- and all large
corporations engaged in interstate business --
whether by license or otherwise, so as to permit
us to deal with the far reaching evils of
overcapitalization.
This year we are making a beginning in the
direction of serious effort to settle some of
these economic problems by the railway rate
legislation. Such legislation, if so framed, as
I am sure it will be, as to secure definite and
tangible results, will amount to something of
itself; and it will amount to a great deal more
in so far as it is taken as a first step in the
direction of a policy of superintendence and
control over corporate wealth engaged in
interstate commerce; this superintendence and
control not to be exercised in a spirit of
malevolence toward the men who have created the
wealth, but with the firm purpose both to do
justice to them and to see that they in their
turn do justice to the public at large.
The first requisite in the public servants who
are to deal in this shape with corporations,
whether as legislators or as executives, is
honesty. This honesty can be no respecter of
persons. There can be no such thing as
unilateral honesty. The danger is not really
from corrupt corporations; it springs from the
corruption itself, whether exercised for or
against corporations.
The eighth commandment reads, "Thou shalt not
steal." It does not read, "Thou shalt not steal
from the rich man." It does not read, "Thou
shalt not steal from the poor man." It reads
simply and plainly, "Thou shalt not steal."
No good whatever will come from that warped and
mock morality which denounces the misdeeds of
men of wealth and forgets the misdeeds practiced
at their expense; which denounces bribery, but
blinds itself to blackmail; which foams with
rage if a corporation secures favors by improper
methods, and merely leers with hideous mirth if
the corporation is itself wronged.
The only public servant who can be trusted
honestly to protect the rights of the public
against the misdeeds of a corporation is that
public man who will just as surely protect the
corporation itself from wrongful aggression.
If a public man is willing to yield to popular
clamor and do wrong to the men of wealth or to
rich corporations, it may be set down as certain
that if the opportunity comes he will secretly
and furtively do wrong to the public in the
interest of a corporation.
But in addition to honesty, we need sanity. No
honesty will make a public man useful if that
man is timid or foolish, if he is a hot-headed
zealot or an impracticable visionary. As we
strive for reform we find that it is not at all
merely the case of a long uphill pull. On the
contrary, there is almost as much of breeching
work as of collar work. To depend only on traces
means that there will soon be a runaway and an
upset.
The men of wealth who today are trying to
prevent the regulation and control of their
business in the interest of the public by the
proper government authorities will not succeed,
in my judgment, in checking the progress of the
movement. But if they did succeed they would
find that they had sown the wind and would
surely reap the whirlwind, for they would
ultimately provoke the violent excesses which
accompany a reform coming by convulsion instead
of by steady and natural growth.
On the other hand, the wild preachers of unrest
and discontent, the wild agitators against the
entire existing order, the men who act
crookedly, whether because of sinister design or
from mere puzzle headedness, the men who preach
destruction without proposing any substitute for
what they intend to destroy, or who propose a
substitute which would be far worse than the
existing evils -- all these men are the most
dangerous opponents of real reform. If they get
their way they will lead the people into a
deeper pit than any into which they could fall
under the present system. If they fail to get
their way they will still do incalculable harm
by provoking the kind of reaction which in its
revolt against the senseless evil of their
teaching would enthrone more securely than ever
the evils which their misguided followers
believe they are attacking.
More important than aught else is the
development of the broadest sympathy of man for
man. The welfare of the wage worker, the welfare
of the tiller of the soil, upon these depend the
welfare of the entire country; their good is not
to be sought in pulling down others; but their
good must be the prime object of all our
statesmanship.
Materially we must strive to secure a broader
economic opportunity for all men, so that each
shall have a better chance to show the stuff of
which he is made. Spiritually and ethically we
must strive to bring about clean living and
right thinking. We appreciate that the things of
the body are important; but we appreciate also
that the things of the soul are immeasurably
more important.
The foundation stone of national life is, and
ever must be, the high individual character of
the average citizen.
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